An increasing number of services and product offerings makes for greater complexity in customer billing, with a comparable impact on the opportunity to introduce errors into bill generation. In order to monitor and improve accuracy in billing, telecommunications carriers perform audits, or reconciliations, of their customer bills.
In the prior art, a telecommunications billing audit commonly consists of comparing call data records (CDR's) from a telecommunications switch against billed records in customer bills. A call data record is well known to those skilled in the art and may comprise, for example, call start time, call stop time, call duration, origination number and destination number. This process in the prior art is known as “switch to bill reconciliation,” and involves a one-way comparison of each CDR to determine if a similar billed record appears in a customer bill. Any CDR's that do not appear in a billed record would be reported as an error, as representing an unbilled call.
However, the prior art switch to bill reconciliation has several deficiencies. First, the comparison is only a one-way comparison in that there is not a validation that each billed record actually arose from a CDR. Therefore, erroneous billed records may appear and be charged to a customer when a call was never actually placed or received. Second, switch to bill reconciliation fails to account for a situation where a single billed record may appear to match more than one CDR. Should more than one CDR match a single billed record, the switch to bill reconciliation system would erroneously think that each CDR had been billed. Third, should a CDR not appear in a billed record, prior art switch to bill reconciliation systems failed to detect where, in the complex chain of transactions from CDR to billed record, the transaction was lost.
Thus, there is a need in the art for a system and method for auditing billing records in a telecommunications system that incorporates greater accuracy checking than the one-way comparison existing in the prior art. There is also a need for a system and method for auditing billing records in a telecommunications system that provides for the possibility that a single billed record matches more than one CDR. There is also a need for a system and method for auditing billing records in a telecommunications system that detects when a transaction is lost while creating a billing record from a CDR. Embodiments of the present invention are directed at overcoming one or more of the above deficiencies in the prior art.